The AI SEO glossary

An AI crawler is a bot that fetches web pages on behalf of an AI company, either to build training data or to retrieve current information for an answer. The main…

An AI Overview is the AI-generated summary Google displays above the organic results for some queries, synthesised from several sources with links to them. Its…

AI SEO covers two different practices that share one name: using artificial intelligence to do SEO work faster (research, drafting, auditing, reporting), and…

Answer engine optimization is optimizing content to be the direct answer a search or AI system returns, whether that appears as a featured snippet, a voice result…

In AI search, a citation is the source link an engine attaches to a claim in its answer. Being cited is the closest equivalent to ranking: it puts your name in…

Generative engine optimization is the practice of getting your content quoted and cited inside AI-generated answers, in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and…

A hallucination is a confident, fluent statement produced by a language model that is factually wrong: an invented statistic, a misattributed quote, a citation to a…

LLM visibility is how often, and how favourably, a brand appears in the answers large language models give to relevant questions. It is measured by running a fixed…

llms.txt is a proposed markdown file at the root of a domain listing the pages an AI system should read to understand the site. It is a curation signal rather than…

Prompt tracking is the practice of running a fixed set of questions against AI engines on a repeating schedule and recording how each one answers: which brands are…

AI share of voice is the percentage of tracked prompts in which your brand is mentioned, compared with your competitors on the same prompt set. It is the standard…

A zero-click search is one that ends without the user clicking through to any website, because the results page answered the question itself. SparkToro's analysis…

AI-generated content is text, images or media produced by a generative model. Google's guidance is that automation is not itself a problem: what triggers spam…

A content brief is the specification handed to a writer or a model before drafting: the target query, the intent, the angle, the sections to cover, the sources to…

A content cluster is a group of pages covering one topic completely: a pillar page defining the subject and spoke pages each handling a single sub-question, all…

Content decay is the gradual loss of traffic from a page that once performed well, as competitors publish something better, the information ages, or the results…

A content score is a number produced by an optimization tool measuring how closely your draft resembles the pages already ranking for a query, based on shared…

A doorway page exists mainly to capture a search query and funnel visitors somewhere else, adding nothing itself. The classic pattern is dozens of near-identical…

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust. It is a framework from Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines used to assess content…

Fact-checking AI content means verifying every checkable claim against a primary source before publication: numbers, dates, prices, names, quotations and study…

Helpful content is Google's framing for content created primarily to serve people rather than to rank. The signals it describes, first-hand experience, depth, a…

A pillar page is the central page of a content cluster: a broad, definitive treatment of a topic that links out to the spoke pages covering each sub-question in…

Programmatic SEO is generating many pages from a structured data source and a template, typically to cover query patterns such as 'X in Y' or 'A vs B' at scale. It…

Scaled content abuse is Google's term for generating many pages, by any method, primarily to manipulate search rankings rather than to help users. It is the spam…

Topical authority is the degree to which a site is treated as a comprehensive source on a subject, built by covering a topic completely and connecting those pages…

Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a link. It tells search engines and readers what the destination page is about, which makes descriptive anchors more…

A canonical URL is the version of a page you declare as the original when several URLs serve similar content. The rel=canonical link element tells search engines…

Core Web Vitals are Google's three page-experience metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (loading), Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness) and Cumulative Layout…

Crawl budget is the number of URLs a search engine will fetch from your site in a given period, set by how much it wants to crawl you and how much your server can…

Duplicate content is substantially identical content available at more than one URL, on your own site or across domains. There is no penalty for it in most cases…

hreflang is an annotation telling search engines which language and regional version of a page to show which audience. It is how multi-market sites avoid the wrong…

Indexation is whether a search engine has stored your page and made it eligible to appear in results. A page can be crawled without being indexed, which is the…

Internal linking is the practice of linking between pages on your own site. It distributes ranking signals, tells search engines which pages matter most, and gives…

JSON-LD is the JSON-based format for embedding structured data in a page, placed inside a script tag. It is the format Google recommends, because it sits separately…

Keyword cannibalization happens when several pages on the same site target the same query and intent, so they compete with each other. Search engines pick one…

Mobile-first indexing means Google uses the mobile version of your page for indexing and ranking. Anything present on desktop but missing on mobile is effectively…

noindex is a directive, in a meta robots tag or an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, telling search engines not to include a page in their index. It is the correct way to…

An orphan page is a page with no internal links pointing to it. Search engines can only find it through a sitemap or an external link, so it is frequently crawled…

Page experience is Google's umbrella term for signals about how it feels to use a page: loading performance, interactivity, visual stability, mobile friendliness…

A rich result is a search result enhanced beyond a title, URL and description: star ratings, product prices, recipe times, event dates, breadcrumbs. Eligibility…

robots.txt is a plain-text file at the root of a domain telling crawlers which paths they may request. It controls crawling, not indexing, and it is a request that…

Schema.org is the shared vocabulary for structured data, maintained collaboratively by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex. It defines the types and properties…

An SEO audit is a systematic review of a site's technical health, content and links, producing a prioritised list of what to fix. Its value is entirely in the…

Structured data is machine-readable markup, usually JSON-LD following schema.org vocabulary, that describes what a page contains: an article, a product, a business…

An XML sitemap is a file listing the URLs on your site you want search engines to know about, with optional metadata such as last modification date. It helps…

A featured snippet is the boxed answer Google displays above the organic results, extracted verbatim from one page. Winning it puts you in position zero, though it…

Keyword difficulty is a tool-generated score estimating how hard it would be to rank on page one for a query, usually derived from the backlink profiles of the…

Keyword research is the process of finding the queries your audience uses, estimating their volume and difficulty, and deciding which are worth targeting. Volume is…

A long-tail keyword is a longer, more specific query with lower search volume and usually clearer intent. Collectively long-tail queries make up the majority of all…

Search intent is what the person actually wants when they type a query: to learn something, to find a specific site, to compare options, or to buy. Matching the…

Search volume is the estimated number of monthly searches for a query. Every figure you see is a modelled estimate, not a measurement, and estimates differ…

SERP stands for search engine results page: everything a search engine shows for a query, including ads, AI summaries, featured snippets, local packs, videos…

Click-through rate is the percentage of impressions that result in a click. In organic search it varies enormously by position, query type and what else occupies…

Google Search Console is Google's free tool showing how your site performs in Search: queries, impressions, clicks, average position, indexation status and…

An impression is recorded each time your page appears in search results for a query, whether or not anyone clicks. In an era of zero-click searches, impressions are…

Rank tracking is monitoring your positions for a set of keywords over time. Third-party trackers estimate positions from their own crawls, which is why their…

A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Links remain one of the strongest ranking signals, and they matter for AI visibility indirectly: engines draw on…

Digital PR is earning coverage and links from publications and communities through newsworthy material: original data, expert commentary, tools or research. It has…

Domain authority is a third-party score, from Moz, Ahrefs, Semrush or another vendor, estimating how likely a domain is to rank based mainly on its backlink…

nofollow is a link attribute telling search engines not to pass ranking credit through that link. Google now treats it as a hint rather than a directive, alongside…

An SEO autopilot is software that runs the full content loop with minimal input: picking topics, writing the article, optimizing it and publishing it to your CMS on…